"color" Category

For many people colours have stark connotations related to their moods. Think of sayings like “feeling blue”, “being green with envy”, “seeing red” or think about mood-rings that supposedly change colour every time your mood changes. Undoubtedly moods and colours are intertwined in one way or another.

Thinking of mood swings related to colour makes me think of my mother, who has bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder causes swings in mood, energy, and the ability to function throughout the day. It is known for alternating periods of depression and mania that can last from days to months. Thus she has experienced extreme mood swings. How does she relate her moods to colour? She personally doesn’t clearly remember what happened during her manic episodes, I however do and noticed how her mania and depression greatly influence her way of dressing. She has a wardrobe filled with exotic clothes in all colours of the rainbow and lot’s of different prints and styles. When being manic she dresses herself as an artwork before going outside, making heads turn wherever she goes. When being depressed she doesn’t really dresses herself, but instead stays in her grey pajamas’s at home all day. I think that a lot of people might experience that they wear more colourful clothes when feeling happy and wearing more neutral toned clothes when feeling sad. I decided to create a colour system based on my mothers way of dressing, and not on people’s way of dressing in general or on people with bipolar disorder’s way of dressing. I thought it would be generalizing people’s experiences too much and I think that especially dealing with people who have a condition like bipolar disorder one must avoid that to avoid stigmatizing the disorder. Not every person with bipolar disorder has the same behaviour towards their wardrobe, or the same experiences in general.

After having decided to make a colour system based on my mother’s way of dressing, I read a lot of general information about bipolar disorder, which didn’t bring me any further in the development of my project. I could also hardly ask my mother any questions about it, as she doesn’t remember how she was when being manic. I later found an interesting article written by someone who also has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, about what having this disorder means for their gender identity. The writer of the article identifies as a non-binary person, and thus I shall refer to them as “their” and “they”. They experience that when being manic they feel more feminine, and when being depressed they feel more masculine. This shows itself in many ways, one of them being the way they dress. When feeling manic, they will wear a dress, when feeling depressed, they will wear baggy clothes. This made me realize how my mother’s way of dressing doesn’t only change in colour when her mood does, but also in how traditionally feminine versus masculine her clothes would be. When being manic it wouldn’t be a bright yellow sweatpants she would put on, but a bright yellow dress. When being depressed she wouldn’t put on a grey miniskirt, but grey oversized sweatpants instead. This was something to keep in mind in the development of my colour system.

After researching I figured it was time to start working hands on. I collected all the traditionally feminine colourful clothes and the traditionally masculine baggy neutral toned clothes from my own wardrobe. I realized that I order my clothes by colour in my wardrobe, in some way I was thus already working on this project of making a colour system before it even started. With the clothes I tried making a small installation without damaging the clothes, this was very frustrating. Somehow nothing I tried seemed to work for me and I soon decided to quit trying. I felt like the best ways of displaying clothes without damaging them already existed and happens all the time and everywhere, which is putting them on mannequins, on hangers or folding them neatly. I didn’t feel like playing clothing store, so this was not the way to go. I took a step back from the whole process, let some time pass to then later come with new insights again. I concluded that the colour system I was trying to create already existed and just needed to be documented. I decided to make a video with my mother, of her wearing two bipolar outfits.

The filming went very smoothly, my mother and I enjoyed putting the outfits together and enjoyed spending time together, which to me makes the video feel genuine too. We tried to make the contrast between her two outfits/moods very clear, but still true to reality. This lead to us filming her depressed outfit inside on the couch, and her manic outfit outside in a field of flowers with more movement. I later also edited the video to be slowed down when her depressed outfit was shown, and sped up the video when her manic outfit was portrayed. When presenting the video, I went back to trying to make an installation using my own clothes but now including the video shown on a tablet. I felt like just showing the video on a big screen would not fit how personal and tangible someone’s clothes, and thus my colour system, are. To make it even more personal/intimate, the viewer of the work needs to wear headphones to hear the sound of the video.

You know how, when you have a bag of sweets, the yellow one is going to taste sour like a lemon, the green one tart like a green apple and the red one will taste the sweetest, like a strawberry.

Have you ever had a blue sweet? They do exist but often don’t represent a certain familiar kind of food. The blue is “odd-tasting”, the blue one is often considered the least tasty of these four colors or at least the least familiar. This is because we are used to associating dark colors, like black and blue, with rotten foods.

Different research over time has proven that color can affect the (sense of) taste of different kinds of food. Even if the food doesn’t actually taste sour but is yellow, our brain will respond to that colour and tell you that this food tastes sour.

“we taste with our eyes long before we taste with our mouths”. Here is a short video of an intelligent looking man telling you more about this phenomenon.

I know there are a lot of interesting turns on this “color” theme but this topic of color in connection to taste and/or the expectation of taste is one I found particularly interesting because apparently we can change each others senses of what we see just by changing a colour which is pretty spectacular!

So; I did some research and wrote the basics of what I found down in my notebook.

Certain colors stand for certain tastes as well as the perception of the freshness and/or ripeness of the foods we see. Our brain creates this link between color and taste and/or smell and also just the expectations of the taste of certain foods.

For example; we expect a red apple to taste more sweet in comparison to a green apple that would have a way more sour taste (which is ok because we know that red is sweet and green is sour).

I wanted to somehow capture this occurrence and I figured that the best way to let the colours speak would be on a photograph because this way the look of the food (where you say “this shape looks like a banana”, or “this shape looks like a lemon”) is the only thing determining your expectations of the food and not the smell, consistency etc which I felt would not make my point stronger.

The next step was to take pictures of a banana, a cooked stake and a tomato, putting them on a differently-coloured background in each picture.

I didn’t feel this worked at all. Looking at these pictures, my perception of the food didn’t change. It looked flat and the only thing that came up with me was how much the bananas looked like an Andy Warhol print.

So then I read about this one study (click “download” in the link. p.22 of the downloaded file) that took place in the 1970’s where investigators had put participants in a room with a colored light and a plate containing cooked meat and fries. Because of the dimmed colored light the participant wouldn’t really be able to determine the color of the food.

Once they had half way finished the plate the light in the room would slowly go back to a normal color which revealed that the meat was blue and the fries were green. As a reaction to this, a lot of participants refused to finish the plate and/or immediately felt sick.

I think this was a strong investigation because it shows very clearly that the color of the food is very important to our brain. It has to work. Our banana simply has to be yellow and our apple red or green, otherwise your brain will definitely warn you not to eat it and it will look way less attractive to eat.

Some extra ideas that came up

So I figured this was what I did wrong with the banana.

This is where the idea of colouring the actual food lured me in. It made total sense that when it would work in this study, it might also work on my photograph.

This way the shape of the food would not cooperate with the color it had which might not work for our brains.

I chose new foods that have a clear taste in our head. So a lemon, a hamburger, a vegan burger and a banana.

And then I painted them which made me decide to let the vegan burger go because this was near to impossible to do and it didn’t have the look that I wanted it to have.

I took these photo’s from above (see above) and thought it was too clean which food isn’t. To me, making the pictures from above made the images look flat, less like real (eatable) foods but rather like something fake, non-existing.

This is why I decided to take the next pictures from the side rather than the top, like the food would be laying in front of you when you look at the image. I used two different background colors for two reasons; To further convey a spacious effect (rather than flat) and to experiment further with the color perception at the same time. The latter conveyed by trying to make the changing perception with different colors more clear in one single image. You could put your hand on the top part of the image and the experience would be different than when you would cover the bottom part, just like it would be different looking at the image and the colors as one whole.

Then I would have to make a next, maybe final, step. What images/image should I use as my final work or should I just continue experimenting until the end result will automatically present itself to me?

Should it be a book? A print? A collage? Everything? A lot of times a photo (series) is displayed in a frame on a wall and maybe also sold in a booklet or on postcards on the side. Is that how it should be with this work? And if I would put work on the wall. Would that be one photo or a series of photos and how would that work since all the works have different colors with the possible result that the colors don’t go well together on the wall.

There are a lot of possibilities but for now I found one way to present the final work I was particularly happy with because of the overall composition of the images I was content with made above but also, to be honest, kind of based on intuition and the general feeling some of the pictures gave me.

I think that, in general, the pictures are very well able to work by themselves but I also think that the images have the ability to amplify/strengthen the general notion of this work, the changing perception of food depending on color.

So in this instance I chose, as perhaps a final work (for now), a collage of different images working by themselves, together.

Aim: I need to combine two words which I found very different from one another: ‘system’ firstly appears to be very restricted while possibilities seem to be unlimited with ‘color’.

FIRST CONCEPT: Connect the situation in which you currently find yourself to music thanks to colors.

Process: You’re heartbroken and alone in the shower.
Find the key words: heartbroken, alone, shower.
Each key word is associated to one color: heartbroken = purple, alone = blue, shower = grey.
In the system, clic on the key words’ fitting colors « purple, blue, grey», it will send you a playlist matching your current needs.

Questions: How to realize the system? Do I use the computer or do I make it by hands? If computer, which site or application should I use? Need to select key words: how many, which ones and why? Do I use common key words or specific ones?

Issues: Want to use computer (better quality of colors, easier to extend the visibility and good way to classify data), I could find a specific application or website. I’ve been told by a classmate, who has studied computer science, that applications she knows are not for amateurs like me but professionals.

Conclusion: Because of a lack of knowledge and no skills in code I can’t bring this first concept to a successful end. I’m better to modify my system so I could create a new realizable one.
I still want to use the computer as my main tool.
However, I want to make this project more personal and subjective, meaning that I want the color system to depend on me. I will set my own rules.

TransitionI’ve asked to a friend of mine, a singer, if he was associating people with music, he answered he wasn’t and return me the question. Then I realize: I’m not associating music to people but colors. Indeed, when I paint someone the association of colors I choose come from what this latter inspires me, what he radiates out.
What if I would connect colors to something else than people? About me? (reminder: want to make this project more personal and subjective). I could write about my personal life? What occurred to me during the day? And connect this specific moment with a color?
From this developed the idea of my second concept: associate situations to colors.

SECOND CONCEPT: Connect a situation in which you have found yourself to colors.

Process: I’m going out of the cinema, touched by the movie I’m lost in my mind. Which color do I see at this current moment?
1) Visualize the color you’re seeing at the current moment
2) Find the color on internet
3) Save it on your phone
4) Give the color a name
5) Write a short sentence describing the situation linked to the color
6) Write the date and city

Questions: Want to use the computer but no code, what should I do? Where should I publish this system? Find a reachable application? Which application would fit the best?

+ Concept: share simultaneously what you’ve done with your followers.
+ Design: matching the concept (edit an image, description bellow, location, share…).
+ 1 Square 1 color: focus on the main theme ‘color’, interesting visual aspect (variety of colors).
+ # ‘hashtag’: to be seen and share data.
+ Follow or be followed by similar accounts

Ideas to complete:1) Account’s name: ‘What i saw while’ = @whatisawhile
It refers to which color I’ve seen while a daily situation occured to me.
2) Profile picture: The color I identify myself with.
3) Short sentence to describe the account’s theme: ‘I associate everyday situations in which I find myself to colors’.

4) Description bellow image: for each image the description will start the same ‘What i saw while’ to give the account a rhythm and an identity and for the viewers to remember the account’s name.
Always the same plan for each publication: 1 color as an image – 1 title as color’s name – 1 sentence to contextualize – 1 date – 1 town – few hashtags.

The DIN is often mistaken for the Deutsche Industrie Norm, which is a name for standards another organization published in the early 20th century. Despite that they aren’t called that way anymore they do serve their main purpose in the (German) industry. So is the DIN colour system.

It took the institute about 10 years to come up with this system. Starting in the 40’s they had their initial results published in 1953. But because it is standard that is still used by the industry it has been regularly updated.

When the researchers started they had as an objective to create a colour system in which to make all the variables in steps that are equidistant. Hue, Brightness and saturation all work in different ways, especially when it comes to how the colours are experienced. In order to define these steps and relations they did visual experiments in which subjects had to pick from a range of 120 colours the ones that they thought were equidistant. They boiled the results of this experiments down to 24 colour hue’s.

By adding Brightness (Darkness) and Saturation a system started to form. Each of the 3 parameters got there own letter. T for hue, S for saturation and D for darkness. By combining these letters you would get a TSD code. Of course the system is not about the parameters, but about in which steps these parameters are divided.

T values are between 0 and 24 and can be interpolated. So you could pick a hue that is not in their carefully selected group of 24 colours. This would not undermine their system as these colours would still be on a equidistant scale of hue.

S values are always between 0 and 6 in which 0 is grey and 6 is maximum saturation.

D values are set between 0 and 10 in which 0 is absolute white an 10 is absolute black.

Now for example if this yellow would be described in a TSD code one would get a 2 as a T value, 5 as S value and 2 as D value. To correctly write down this code a colon should be placed between the numbers. In this case it would be 2:5:2.

I think the most interesting part of this system is that it tried to make all steps within the system equal. Even though this resulted in a system in which all colours are mathematically unequal.

Ignaz Schiffermüller (1727-1806) was an Austrian naturalist mainly interested in insects, specially butterflies. He was a teacher at the Theresianum College in Vienna. Schiffermüller is also recognized for his work in optics and colour theory. He developed scientifically based colour nomenclature to describe the countless tones of nature.

In 1772 his work “Versuch eines Farbensystems” was published . It contained an attractive full-page engraving with a colour circle, inspired by the optical theory of French Jesuit Louis Bertrand Castel(1688–1757) and hand-tinted with twelve colours continuously shading into one another. He developed it based on natural samples of colour and colour charts where he compared the tones. The circumference of Schiffermüller’s circle is filled with twelve colours to which he has given some very fanciful names: blue, sea-green, green, olive-green, yellow, orange-yellow, fire-red, red, crimson, violet-red, violet-blue and fire-blue. The three primary colours of blue, yellow and red are not placed at equal distances from each other; between them come three kinds of green, two kinds of orange and four variations of violet (excluding the secondary colour violet). Schiffermüller selects a total of 12 colours like Father Castel who linked his system to music — more specifically, the twelve semi-tones of the musical scale.

Ignaz Schiffermuller’s system served to illustrate Newton’s discovery that the pure colours could be arranged in a circle. He was one of the first to arrange the complementary colours opposite one another: blue opposite orange; yellow opposite violet; red opposite sea green. Schiffermüller also placed a sun (only suggested here) inside his colour circle in order to emphasize that all colours are produced by nature.

What all three scholars had in common aside from naturalistic origins of their studies is how tones of colours and shading is crucial for development of each colour. The gradual change in colour’s intensity is visually representing the natural unstability of colours and how we perceive them. Because of that we can consider Schriffermuller’s work as a contemporary study of colour.

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental psychology of memory. He is mostly known for his discovery of the forgetting curve (describes how the ability of the brain to retain information decreases in time), the learning curve (graphical representation of the rate at which you make progress learning new information) and the spacing effect (phenomenon whereby information is learned and retained more easily and effectively when its studying is spread out over time).

However, Hermann Ebbinghaus has also been known thanks to its colour system. Indeed, the concept of the double pyramid gained in popularity thanks to the latter.

In 1902, he proposed a new version of Hofler’s double pyramid. Ebbinghaus constructed a colour system rest on this system of double pyramid but made few modifications: he put rounded corners and an inclined central plane.

He rounds off the corners of the solid as he considered the transition between colours as fluid and not sharply defined. The Hering-type fundamental opponent colours are located at the six corners (black, green, red, blue, yellow, white). The resulting chromatic body, from the four primary colours, links Leonardo da Vinci’s idea that colours vary in brightness and can thus be differentiated. The idea was to separate and so distinguish those four colours due to the variation of brightness. The base-square of the double solid is tilted in such a way that the best yellow hues, which are relatively bright, are nearer to white, and the best blue tones, which are relatively dark, are nearer to black. His system does not predict the mixtures of colours and the complementary pairs are not arranged opposite one another.

In 1893, Ebbinghaus published a «Theory of Colour Vision» in the Zeitschrift für Psychology (Journal of Psychology), in which he mentioned that humans perceive colours through higher mental processes. As a psychologist, he knew about the perception of the four elementary colour (yellow, red, green, blue) and thanks to physiologists knew there were only three photo-sensitive substances in the eye’s retina (rods, cones, photosensitive retinal ganglion cells) thanks to which the phenomenon of coloured vision and its anomalies could be explained.

In addition, Ebbinghaus has discovered that two white hues produced by spinning either red and green or blue and yellow, appeared to be the same at certain levels of brightness, but appeared different when the illumination was reduced or the speed was reduced.

The colour-sphere has the pure colours around the equator, starting with the three primary colours of red, yellow and blue. Three mixed colours take their place in each of the equal intermediate spaces between the primaries, while white and black form the sphere’s poles. Runge wished to capture the harmony of colours — not the proportions of mixtures. He wished to bring a sense order to the totality of all possible colours, and sought an ideal colour-solid.

• Philipp Otto Runge develops the concept of the color sphere. His goal was to show the complete realm of colors, using only the mixture of the three primary colors (red, blue, yellow). Runge saw the three colors as a “simple symbol of the Holy Trinity” and black and white as “light is goodness, and darkness is evil.” His idea was to expand the hue existing circle into a sphere, with white and black forming the two opposing poles.

•Featured are the primary colours red, yellow and blue. They have the same distance to each other. The secondary colours orange, purple and green also have the same distance. The upper part of the sphere is white; the colours become lighter. The lowest part of the sphere is black; The colours become darker. Red, blue yellow, black and white have the same distance from each other.

The ISCC-NBS system of color designation is a system of naming colors based
on a set of 13 basic color terms, it was first established in the 1930’s by a joint
effort of the Inter Society Color Council and the National Bureau of Standards.

The ISCC-NBS system believed colors should have names. The objective of the system is to assign precise names to the individual blocks of color of the A.H. Munsell color system, using ordinary words. And the systems goal is to designate colors in the Unites States Pharmacopoeia, the National Formulary and in general literature. And the system should be acceptable and usable by science, art and industry, and should be understood, at least in a general way by the whole public.

The backbone of the ISCC–NBS system is a set of 13 basic color categories,
made up of 10 hue names and three neutral categories: pink(Pk), red(R), orange(O),
brown(Br), yellow(Y), olive(OI), yellow green(YG), green(G), blue(B), purple(P), white(Wh),
gray(Gy) and black(Bk).

Then there are 16 intermediate categories, such as: reddish orange (rO) so an adjective and the hue name.
other example: purplish blue (pB).

These categories can be further subdivided into 267 named categories by combining a hue name with modifiers. Like the subdivision for Purple, you have all these works for how the color feels/looks, like: “blackish” (bk.), “dark-ish gray” (d.-ish Gy). So they really wanted to find a way to objectively measure a color. And I feel that this way is pretty objective for a color naming system. I find that this system is fast and easily communicated through the system they made using the brackets.

Athanasius Kircher,was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath. As he had outstanding talents and wide range of interests in mathematics, geology, medicine, etc. he has been often compared to fellow scholar Roger Boscovich and to Leonardo da Vinci. Kircher also was a follower of the theory called ON COLOURS which argues that all colors (yellow, red, and blue) are derived from mixtures of black and white.

As we can see in this diagram, all the color points of the system can be reached from white and black, and this shows his fundamental view on colors as genuine product of light and shadow. In his system, all combinations of colors are produced with three colors between white and black and all the possible mixtures are shown on half-circles.
For example, in the case of green, which is a mixture of yellow and blue, it is located at the overlap of yellow and blue and takes a special position as it is in the center with red below. It remained influential until Isaac Newtons’s experiments with light refraction came out. In fact, the prism, and its effect on light, was something already known to Kircher, but he made an incorrect ordering of colors from bright to black. Newton was the one who defined the right order of the rainbow colors.

Still his system has significance for the color theories for these reasons.

It is a linear diagram with red, yellow and blue as the basic colors

It is a theory behind De Coloribus (all colors are derived from mixtures of black and white)

It also provides a firm idea of mixed colors, characterized by semi-circular bows

Robert Ridgway (Illinois, 1850-1926) was an ornithologist who, next to hundreds of publications on bird species, wrote two books on color-classification. In the first book, A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists (1886), was relatively simple, but already gave 186 colors their own names, which was different to how colors were described at that time; usually they were named and described subjectively.

Looking for a way to create a more advanced and expanded work, Ridgway published his second book in 1912: Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (link to the book itself), with 1,115 new names for colors. This way it was a lot easier to communicate about specific colors between taxonomists in all kinds of scientific fields. Ridgway’s system is still used a lot in taxonomy to this day.

The figure above shows how Ridgway visualized his coloursystem. One could imagine a two-dimensional, straight line, which has a lightness-gradient, going from white to black. This line doesn’t contain any colour, but as soon as it’s imagined as a three-dimensional shape, the line is surrounded by all 1,115 colours. The colours Ridgway specified were split up in thirty-six individuals, called the “pure colours”. The different teints in between the white, black, and “pure colour”, were all presented and named on the fifty-three hand-painted colourplates (as shown below). Though most of them were very well preserved, thanks to special care being taken to make them durable, some did slightly change hue. Sadly, an exact description on the procedure of how the colours were mixed is missing in the book, making the colours that changed, lost.

The scientist James Clerck Maxwell discovered the additive colour system and showed the first colour photography. He lived in the 19th Century, influenced by the Works of Isaac Newton and Thomas Young. He has impact on our knowledge of the Saturn Rings, Electromagnetic waves and the RGB colours.

Maxwell at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is holding one of his colour wheels.

In his student years at the Cambridge he was fascinated by the questions:

What are colours? Why do we perceive colour? And why are we so coloured?

At that time he read the studies of Thomas Young. Young thought that painters have a much better understanding of colours then scientist had at that time. They used the primary colours to get the full colour spectrum of a painting. He found that there’s a significance of these three primary colours and that biology has a role to play. He assumed there are three receptors for each of the primary colours in the human brain. By mixing these we receive our full colour view.

Maxwell read about this theory and wanted to prove it by mathematics. He developed a tool to trick the human brain. By spinning the right amounts of red, green and blue on a wheel, it seems like the colours are melting together to white. With this experiment he could prove that what we perceive as white is actually a mix of colours. And that there’s a difference of mixing colours in light and colours in pigments.

From this he developed a Red, Green and Blue colour pyramid. On each corner there is the absolute of one of the primary colours. Towards the middle you get different hues of the colour and the center is white. The Pyramid is built on a x/y Axe. Mapping out a point on the pyramid gives a value of each of the primary colours.

To display his finds, he was invited to give a lecture on colour vision. What he did was to screen the same photograph with a red then green and blue light on top of each other. Where the colours intersect, there is white.

At this time there was only black and white photography. With this experiment he made the world’s first colour photography. The additive colour system can be understood as the foundation of RGB colours and is used in the screens of most electronic devices today.

I am going to explain to you Ewald Hering’s very exciting colour wheel chart containing of not 3 (RGB) but 4 primary colours (RGBY).

Hering was a German physiologist who specialised in colour perception. So basically how our eyes and brains work in relation to colour which we can call “the physiology of visual perception”
A problem that came up was the colour yellow; Helmholtz, another physicist who came op with the RGB model (the Young-Helmholtz theory) had stated that yellow came from a mixture of red and green (so there being 3 primary colours).

For hering this was not in line with the human experience because the sensation of yellow is very important and is not seen as a mixture of something else.

So next to black and white there would be 4 colours which can occur without the “help” of another colour.
Every perception (what we see) is a mixture of the six basic sensations (so these four colours plus black and white) opposing each other and thus interacting.

Hering called these colours the “psychological primaries”.

Hering states that in the human eye thus brain there are three processes happening at the same time in order to see colour; the red-green, yellow-blue and black and white sensation. Later on I will explain why Hering also calls these sensations the “opposing pairs”.

(In his system, red green yellow and blue can be seen as primary colours. Anyone who is seeing orange can imagine it to be a mix of red en yellow. But no one looks at red, yellow or blue and sees it as a mixture of other colours.)

Hering wasn’t the first to talk about 4 primary colours. Before him so did Leonardo da Vinci. Only the arranging of the colours in a circular model was something Hering did. So the wheel is his invention with which he proved to have a real point.

The outer ring of the wheel shows how every primary colour has a warm and a cool side.
So warm red is red with a lot of yellow while cool red is more bluish
Warm yellow goes towards red and cool yellow towards green. Etc.

Each primary colour pair in the wheel has the same warm and cool side.
For example: Green and red have yellow for warm and blue for cold which makes them pairing as well as opposing.

Although having the same hot and cold sensations, the opposing colours in the weel cannot be part of each other.
– yellow can be kind of green or red but never blue
– green can be kind of blue or yellow but never red.

Complementary colours complete each other (like in the RGB wheel) but Hering’s opposing colours do the exact opposite.

A lot of us have learned in high school that there are three primary colours; red yellow and blue. The thing is actually that this 3 primary colour wheel is how to mix colours by knowing what colours complement each other and what colours generally look good together.
If we are talking about how we actually see colours, there are 4 primary colours!
So this is the big difference between the two wheels; the three colour wheel is about aesthetics while the 4 colour wheel (Hering’s) is about the psychological relationship we have towards colour.

You have to look at the 4 colour wheel like meters in your head. When the meter goes one way, there is more red, if it goes the other way you get green. If the meter stays in the middle you get zero so no colour (or actually a kind of greyish or brownish), same with yellow and blue.
Then at the same time you have a meter that, for example, goes from a reddish yellow to a greenish yellow and that goes from a yellowish green to a blueish green
And then there is also a meter that adds more or less black or white, also changing the colour.

R – 0 – G , so there is no greenish red
B – 0 – Y , so there is no yellowish blue

There is a greenish blue or a reddish blue (purple)
There is also a greenish yellow or a reddish yellow (orange)

Hering’s colour wheel is used a lot because it shows how the eye naturally perceives colour. So it’s less a bout just mixing paint or seeing how colors can be made in different media in what case you would need only three colours (RGB).

Instead, the wheel is better at showing what happens in the upper, brain level, and describing humans colour sensations.

CMYk is color system used for printing. To print an mage, first you have to separate it into four colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.
Each of this colors consists from halftone dots, when dots of different colors overlap each other you can get all colors of rainbow. By using halftones of each colour, we are able to mix various percentages of all four process colours to print a huge spectrum of colours. If you take a magnifying glass to the full colour image, you will see that it is comprised of dots of various process colour. There is a measure of density of this color dots, it is called DPI, in particular the number of individual dots that can be placed in a line within the span of 1 inch (2.54 cm). If you are printing photo, dpi should be around 300. But if you are printing big board or posters, something that people will observe from the distance dpi can be less than that.

In theory, the mixing of C, M and Y should give a black color, but in practice gives a dirty brown. Therefore, the fourth paint is often added black. If we add one or more of the other CMY colours to Black in 4 colour process printing, we get a darker, truer Black than just using Black ink alone. It is called Rich Black. In theory, you can get the richest Black by using 100% of all four inks but in practice, you are limited by how much ink you can lay down on the paper (how wet the paper can get) and the technology used in the printing process. A typical Rich Black mixture would be 50% Cyan, 40% Magenta, 40% Yellow and 100% Black. This produces a darker Black that is neutral in colour. Some other combinations of process colours can produce other looks like “Cool Black” or “Warm Black”. Rich Black should never be used for small type, especially fonts with fine serifs.

RGB is an additive colour model, meaning that lights are added together in different frequencies to create colours. For example, when red and green lights are added together they create a yellow colour. This is different to a subtractive colour model where colours are created by mixing dyes, pigment paints etc. which then absorb parts of the full spectrum of colour frequencies available in white light and reflect other frequencies which then give the surface it’s colour.

RGB is used in digital colour sensors and digital colour displays and projectors. Each pixel on a screen has three tiny light sources, red, green and blue in colour. These emit different brightnesses which in the combined effect create the specified colour of the pixel. The sum of all the pixels on the screen will create an image.

These three colours, Red, Green and Blue, are chosen because they correspond to the way the human eye sees colour. We have photo-receptor cells in our eyes called rods and there are three types of rods. One which detects long-wave frequencies of light, another for middle-wave and another for short-wave. Specifically, these correspond to the frequencies of blue, green and red.

The first experiments with RGB were with colour photography in the 19th century. The same photo would be taken with a red, green and blue filter on black and white film and then composited together in printing. Here is an example of the Russian photographer, SergeyProkudin-Gorsky who used this technique in the early 20th century:

The CMN system was first introduced in Venice, 1986. Colours transform; they get brighter and darker until they eventually become white or black, as well as altering the quality of transparency and reflectiveness. The system shows why and how colours appear, change and disappear. Eat point of the tetrahedral structure marks the different qualities in reflectiveness, transparency, brightness and darkness the colour can posses. This single tetrahedron can be combined with others and create a complete range of spacial models required to find the origins of the colour as well as reflect the intentions of the observer. Despite transparency and reflection stemming from an object which is illuminated, the colours appearing will be the result of the contribution made by the observer. The effect these two qualities have on colours is at the forefront of this colour system, as it is the first to consider transparency and reflection in a colouring ordering system.

The tetrahedron construction was a form first seen in Plato’s geometrical idea of colour. The radiance must appear along side the colours and have equal value, only white being allowed dominance. The tetrahedron is taken as a basis, three can be assembled with their tip representing white interlocking acting as the central point and remains colourless. This forms a second triangular plane with a colour appointed to eat corner. The white centre being empty allows colours to be mixed. This idea given by Plato is not a formally constructed colour system, rather the personal view is intended to aid understanding the colour mixtures he describes.

Hermann von Helmholtz was a German physician and physicist. He was born in 1821 in Potsdam, Germany and died in 1894. Hermann von Helmholtz was a pioneer in several scientitv fields, and made significant contributions. In the field of physiology and psychology he is specially known for his studies of the mathematics of the eye, ideas on visual perception of space and colour vision research. In 1851, Helmholtz became world famous, after his invention of the ophthalmoscope – an instrument that could examine the inside of the human eye. Together with Thomas Young, an English physician, he developed a theory of trichromatic colour vision. The theory assumed that the eyes retina consist of three different kinds of light receptors for red, green and blue. The trichromatic theory was quickly accepted, so Hermann von Helmholtz continued to study colour.

The colour diagram appeared for the first time between 1856 and 18867 in his famous manual of psychological optics. here, Helmholtz introduces three variables; hue, saturation and brightness, all which we are still using to characterize colour. These variables were chosen to correspond to the three parameters of sound, amplification, pitch and timbre. Helmholtz discovered that the only difference between sound and the perception of colour is that the eye cannot differentiate between the components of a mixed colour, while the ear can easily identify separate elements of sound.

Helmholtz was the first to demonstrate that the colours which Newton has seen in his spectrum are different from colours applied to a white base using pigments. He discovered how spectral colours shine more intensely and possess greater saturation(1). In the manual he also submits that James Clerk

Maxwell’s triangle is too small to accommodate the saturated spectral colours, and that Newton’s colour spectrum neither did explicitly refer to trichromatic theory. In the colour diagram, the spectral

colours is arranged on a curved line , to achieve a better understanding of their mixtures. In order to attain white, Helmholtz discovered that it did not require equal quantities of violet-blue and yellow for example. The diagram is instead arranged so that the complementary colours that required a bigger amount to obtain white, were given a greater authority. Helmholtz then did a modified version of Maxwell’s construction of the triangle, and arranges the colour diagram inside the triangle, with the spectral colours having varying distances to white, which lies in the center of the triangle.

Albert-Vanel created a so-called Plantetaric Room, in which the colours move like planets in a solar system. The floating planets represent four primary colours, which refer to the psychological primary-colours of Ewald Hering. Albert-Vanel incorporated Herings’ psychological primary colours (Yellow, Red, Green, Blue) into his planetary room. The secondary colours – that connect the primary-colours – are moons and thus orbit the planets.

We almost never see colours isolated but in combination with others, which puts them directly into a context. The planetary system tries with the introduction of new parameters to describe this context in which a colour exists. In order to point out an individual colour, contrast and material are added to the usual parameters of hue, brightness and saturation.

The contrast-parameter unites three new scales (again hue, brightness and saturation) describing a group of colours (the context), to later point out the individual isolated colour.

The scales of the material-parameter describe first if a colour is active (light) or passive (pigment), second if it is transparent or opaque and thirdly: matte or gloss.

With the incorporation of this context a colour is put in, the planetary system involves the natural effects of our colour perception. It considers, that we see colours differently depending on the surrounding it is put in.